Fun with starfall

I’m glad you don’t suck anymore. I have been waiting a long time for this day. Now, when stars fall from the sky, they actually do more than tickle!

<3 Lissanna

So, last night, I was able to do some DPS in a raid for the first time since starfall was buffed with the latest patch. I’m running with the moonfire, starfire, starfall glyph set, and I think it is working out well for me.

I have to say that starfall felt powerful for those 10 seconds it was up, and then I’d go back to not feeling as powerful for the next 50 seconds until the cooldown was back up again. So, over the course of the fight, it was a DPS increase, but nothing really amazing. It looked really cool on trash mobs, though – and my guild played a game called “watch how much damage it does on huge AOE packs”!

Starfall did more damage over the course of the night than my DOTs (moonfire & insect swarm combined!). They also make my treant damage look pale in comparison, but I also don’t pop trees on trash mobs & such, so it’s harder to interpret.

Here’s a glimpse of the overall spell % break down that I took at some point.

This has hurricane at 13% (for all the AOE packs), and then Starfall at 21% overall. This is collapsed across AOE & boss fights, though. I don’t have one saved from a boss fight (and I don’t have a WoL report for last night), but Starfall was making up probably an average of 15% of my damage on boss fights, and definitely making my contribution from moonfire/starfire look small in comparison. It also makes my treant damage look small on boss fights, as I don’t use treants on trash normally. I think these % breakdowns are also more interesting than total DPS breakdowns, since Skada is less reliable than WoL. Also, typhoon was only there because I was having to slow adds on Saurfang.

All the theorycrafting math didn’t predict how much more FUN starfall was going to feel. I also wasn’t using starfall as consistently before the buff, so my starfall damage was sitting around 2% of my damage most of the time pre-buff. So, the % damage done by starfall was really a dramatic increase for me in the logs.

Close Calls of the aggro kind: I also learned yesterday that starfall will pull the adds on Rotface if you aren’t careful, and that was the one point where I almost wiped the raid with my starfall testing. I found that popping it once at the beginning and then waiting for the add to explode was the safest way to not pull threat on them (and then my DPS was higher while I was running from the explosion). It’s really the only place I ran into that problem, so long as I gave the tanks time to get threat before I unloaded my starfall fury.

On PvP: I don’t have the resilience gear necessary to test it in PvP very well, so I’m not able to speak for whether or not it worked at all in PvP. Given how little forum QQ there actually is, I’m guessing that there just aren’t enough PvP moonkin out there doing arenas for people to really have even noticed the change. However, I hear people are running into groups in WG and battlegrounds, popping starfall, watching the numbers fly, and then dieing a quick and painful death, since starfall alone doesn’t do enough to kill a group of people (it just makes them really angry). So, it’s nice, but not game-breaking in any way. I think moonkin really are the glass-cannons right now in PvP, since survivability is still low.

It’s Skada. I had to switch in 3.3 because recount was causing game crashes (where I didn’t crash when I got rid of recount, but if I put it back, I’d start crashing again). I really do like using Skada because it estimates absorption from priest shields by default, so it’s easier for me to see how our healers are doing in raids when I’m healing.

I would be greatly disappointed if starfall was nerfed again. PvE wise, we are fine. PvP wise, there are numerous ways for most classes to counter and nullify our ability completely. No doub it will hurt in PvP, but so does a POM-Pyro or Killing Spree.

The buff to Starfall, combined with the fact the game keeps throwing Boomkin gear my way, finally convinced me to finish gemming and enchanting my thrown-together (aka, half resto gear) DPS spec last night. Some testing at the dummy has left me cautiously optimistic, though Starfall’s huge range still has me terrified to use in actual dungeons/raids. (My first Heroic as Boomkin was Old Kingdom. Guess what happened on the trash mobs after the vampire dude? /sigh)

Still, when the raid leader asks if any of the healers have a DPS spec, I’m getting closer and closer to answering “I do!” rather than “Me, but it’s TERRIBLE.”

The only (pseudo-)complaint I have about the starfall buff is that it makes farming more difficult. I used to be able to cast starfall to agro a large group of mobs and then hurricane to kill them. This left the bodies in a nice circle around me for easy looting. Now they die before they reach me, so I have to go gather up their loot. That’s a problem I can live with. It is certainly more fun.

I’m having so much fun with Starfall!
I was farming some icy dragonscales and I usually can pick up a few on the ground and hurricane them. The Starfall range is so wide I was pulling them from the air too. I always wondered why hurricane didn’t hit the airborne.

I think I might be able to solo Leeeeroy.
I plan on finding some big groups of mobs (the catacombs under UK come to mind) just so I can have some fun with it’s wide range.
Finally, I think I can convince my guild to go for Zombiefest in CoS.

Have to try starfall when grinding mobs for the argent tournament daily

Also, Liss, do you have any recommendations for Druid healing addons or User Interfaces. The only thing I use right now to heal Heroic five mans (healed Heroic Forge of Souls the other night without having been to regular on my druid ) is a macro for casting Lifebloom on my focus. Guess what era of WoW that’s left over from? I just use it differently now.

Chezza – Your question is more complicated than I can fit in a comment, or I can answer right now, so I’ll get to UI healing issues “soon.”

Treeboi – Last night was pretty limited, and I think my max was about 33 K at some point that the other DPS saw after I started talking about how much fun I was having with starfall. I also was doing a 10-man and not our normal 25-man, since our raid leader was sick and the stars didn’t align for us to do a 25-man this week, so my DPS wasn’t as high as it would have been with full 25-man raid buffs. So, I wanted to highlight things other than what my DPS was for the night, since I wasn’t doing 25-man ideal conditions for comparison with my previous DPS nights. I also don’t have a WoL report to analyze to see what my peak vs. average DPS was for various fights.

We had 5 boomkins in WG before it started, we had a quite chat amongst ourselves, once the battle started we moved as one, as the horde arrived at the gate we dropped starfall and hurricanes as one! Oh it looked so pretty, the dead bodies were entertaining too